There was a Tyranid army at Baltimore that had been dipped in tinted floor wax. From two tables away, it looked great. From one table away, it looked pretty good. From across the table it looked ... alright, I guess. From any closer it looked like somebody had dipped a bunch of Tyranids in tinted floor wax.

It's always been there - hell, I've seen dipped 2nd ed. armies. Basically it's a sprayed or dipped base coat followed by a dipped wash coat (lots of things work as the wash coat including the above mentioned floor wax). Looks about as good as a basecoat + wash, imho.

www.thewarp.net/war/thefo...krull.htmlI think it also depends on the minis. It seems to lend itself well to flowing organic shapes (cloaks, chitinous plates, etc.) Not sure how well it would work on larger, flat surfaces (tau suits, etc.)

All minwax does is wash and varnish your mini's at the same time. You can get the exact same effect by just washing the thing. The other handicap with dipping is that you're washing the whole mini in the same color. This is going to make stuff with lots of texture like chainmail look good, it's going to make stuff with swoops and recesses look good, and it's totally useless on flat pieces (tanks, for example).

The thing that turns me off from using something as thick as varnish is that when you dip them you get a lot of excess on the mini. To make it look like they did in the link you have to kind of spin the mini around as fast as you can to get enough centripital force to fling the excess varnish off. This, of course, means you have to have a room where you don't mind spattering everything with drips of varnish as they fly off. At least when you don't have the varnish mixed in with a thicker dip job you can just wipe off the excess (like the way I've seen people do skeletons with shoe polish).